Collection: Ryo Fukui

Ryo Fukui started on accordion at eighteen and did not touch a piano until he was twenty-two, which is late enough that most jazz institutions would have already written him off. He moved from his birthplace of Biratori in Hokkaido to Tokyo, taught himself the instrument entirely through listening and practice, and spent the following years in the kind of intense solitary study that produces either nothing or something distinctive. In his case: "Scenery" (Nadja, 1976), recorded in Sapporo with his brother Yoshinori on drums and Satoshi Denpo on bass, a hard bop and modal piano trio album with a red cover that became one of the most recognised images in Japanese jazz. The album's reputation during his lifetime was primarily domestic. It was only after his death in 2016 that YouTube algorithms and online jazz communities spread it globally, and the reissues that followed sold in quantities that would have surprised Fukui considerably. The comparison pressed onto him most often is McCoy Tyner, and it is apt: his left hand voicings are dense and orchestral in a way that draws from the same post-Coltrane harmonic vocabulary. But Fukui remained in Sapporo, played regularly at the Slowboat jazz club he was associated with throughout his later life, and never chased the wider recognition his music eventually found. He deepened his bebop grounding through mentorship with American pianist Barry Harris from 1992. He recorded "Ryo Fukui in New York" (1999) and "My Favorite Tune" (1994) before his death on March 15, 2016. His widow Yasuko continues to run the Slowboat.